While the conventional repetition of institutional performance reinforces the existing pattern, logic, and principle of its own system, artistic archives based on repetitive strategies do not contribute to defining existing archival systems as grand narratives but to questioning the reliability and power of it and rupturing preserved memory. In order to deeply investigate the paradoxical coalition between archival art and institution, I shall examine how the standardised
archival system has historically been built and solidified and further suggest how unusual rhythms of repetition in artistic archives have encroached the administration and bureaucracy of cultural institutions. This study would give an insight into how Sisyphean archives generate eccentric orders within institutions, suggesting an offbeat route to reading archives and archiving as a social system and power.
The modern concept of archives was inherited from the nineteenth century. The authoritarian, bureaucratic, objectified “archivisation” of that century was ambitiously realised as an ideal dream of total control for social memory and national history.55 The significance of the archive in the modern era can be characterised as the means by which “repositories of factual knowledge” are stored and “objectively verifiable facts” are accumulated.56 Such an archival discourse has been developed alongside modern history and historiography on the basis of the historical positivism of the nineteenth century. Historians had strong beliefs in linear time and the neutrality of historical narratives, based on credulity towards a set of archives conveying factual, objective historical knowledge. These concepts of archives have been dismantled and contested by post-structural thinkers and constantly revisited and reinvented by artists from the twentieth century to the present. I shall examine later in more detail how the project of modern historiography combined with European colonialism sought comprehensive knowledge and a coherent history through building up official state archives. At this stage, I shall first illuminate how artists’ usage of archival language and bureaucratic aesthetics could be realised in a versatile way in order to emasculate such positivism and authoritarianism.
Thanks to the artists’ challenging questions and art practices, more critical and flexible views of archives have been suggested. One such suggestion is that the boundaries of the archive should neither be considered fixed nor be considered neutral but be seen as shifting and transformable. Nevertheless, the paradigm of modern archives developed in the nineteenth century still considerably affects contemporary archives in terms of their exteriority and
55 Spieker, op. cit.
operation. It still pervades the ways in which the past is written about, how visible and invisible politics and power of institutions are exerted, how archival systems and technology are
managed, and how knowledge is controlled today. Pierre Nora famously articulated:
Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image. What began as writing ends as high fidelity and tape recording. The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs – […] The imperative of our epoch is not only to keep everything, to preserve every indicator of memory – even when we are not sure which memory is being indicated – but also to produce archives. 57
Our epoch is indeed archival, feverishly producing archives. Commonly, personal and collective information is accumulated and managed in the form of files and dossiers in public and governmental records. What we call social and cultural memories in actuality consist of rows and rows of archival documents and boxes that constitute the enormous storehouse
beyond immediate comprehensibility.58 Besides, in the age of new media, the scope and volume of archiving has explosively expanded because individuals also actively get involved with their own archival impulse and memory projects using prevalent digital media technology and digital platforms. Quantitative accumulation and obsessive production of archives are a phenomenal sign of archive fever today. Artists are, of course, engaged in this fever and their works then tend to blur the borders between artistic archives and institutional archives as having been explored in the earlier sections above. The bureaucratic exteriority of artists’ works is often indistinguishable from that of institutional practices. Then, what does this endless archival production mean and how do artists make the best use of archival bureaucracy – administrative listing, ordering, controlling, and managing – in their practices? The artists’ intervention seems not to address memorial or historical representation embedded in the archive but to
57 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, translated by Marc Roudebush, in
Representations, No. 26, Spring, 1989, pp. 13-14.
performatively disclose a certain kind of effect, dissimulating its ultimate intention and destabilising regulatory circumstances of archival culture.
The One Million Years series (Fig. 2.1.7) by On Kawara (1932–2014) consists of two works: One Million Years - Past (1969) that begins at 998031 BC and ends at 1969 AD, and
One Million Years - Future (1981) that starts from 1981 and goes up to 1001980 AD.59 The works from this series altogether constitute 20 volumes of loosely bound books, stored in a cardboard archive box. The small prints of years in black are neatly stacked side by side on each page. These consecutively typed years are seemingly endless. The thickness of their physical appearance heavily conveys a typical encyclopaedic form of the archival record or of knowledge accumulation. While flipping through a few pages, thousands of years can speedily be experienced without being able to be identified.60 The sense of time becomes pale and plain, as the enumerated years quickly pass by in the turn of a few pages. In fact, the printed words on paper are going to become fainter as well, because they were printed at a copy shop using a common office print toner and this medium is unstable and inappropriate for the purpose of long-term storage. Thus, Kawara anticipated that they would eventually disappear in the
future.61 By recording the last one million years and the next million years that followed, within the real space of a book continued in separate volumes, he transformed the immaterial concept of time and the human capacity to grasp it into an abstract but visible form.62 The archival effort to reconstruct an immensurable passage of time in “its system of accumulation and disappearance” is what fails to be established here. In other words, an indefinite accumulation of time and knowledge in the present form of the archive, as finitude, is impossible. This archival mimicking piece not only literally mocks failure and impermanence of the preservation system but also visibly makes sceptical comments about the faith we have in it.
59 Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzen (eds.), Deep Storage: Collecting, Sorting, and Archiving in Art, Prestel, 1998, p. 178.
60 Ibid.
61 James Putnam, Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium, London: Thames & Hudson, 2009, p. 60.
62 Anne Rorimer, ‘The Date Paintings of On Kawara’, in Karel Schampers(ed.), On Kawara: Date Paintings in 89
Figure 2.1.7. On Kawara, One Million Years, 2009, David Zwirner Gallery New York
Uriel Orlow (b. 1973), in his Housed Memory (2000–2005), deals more radically with historical and mnemonic failure in the overwhelming amount of archival accumulation. The administrative consequence of repetition is more visibly intensified. Housed Memory is a nine- hour long video work filmed along all the shelves of the Wiener Library collection. This library is one of the oldest Holocaust archives in the world, in which materials pertaining to the Holocaust, genocide, and Fascism, as well as eyewitness accounts of related events are included. It was built in Germany by Dr Alfred Wiener during the 1920s and was then
transferred to London in 1939.63 In the video, Orlow focused on documenting the archive itself: its material presence and physicality. The seemingly endless tracking shot pans all the contents of the entire archive and simultaneously records people’s voices at the library talking about their research or about related documents. The nine-hour long running time covers a
considerable amount of the collection and the linear flow of the camera movement (or of time) continues to detect stored material shelf by shelf, which might otherwise have been hidden
63 The Wiener Library, ‘Our History’, [Online] Available at: http://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/Our-History, Last accessed 7 July 2016.
from view. The angle of the camera, however, merely reveals the titles on the book spines and labels on the archival boxes, as if there is no interest in showing the contents.
Orlow once discussed this work, questioning himself: “[…] how to do justice to such a collection and by implication to the subject matter it covers, if both the historical event itself and the amount of archival material which documents it are ungraspable in their enormity?”64 Orlow’s self-questioning echoes Giorgio Agamben’s argument of “the aporia of Auschwitz”.65 For Agamben, there is a discrepancy between the given historical facts about Auschwitz and the real truth. In other words, such an unforgettable and unimaginable historical event may be verifiable through factual elements but it is not always comprehensible.66 The sheer size of archival presence, the archiving system, and its language would not guarantee portrayal of the true nature of these enormous historical facts: they still remain ungraspable, unthinkable, and unimaginable. This becomes more obvious when listening to an interview with a Holocaust survivor, who worked as a volunteer at the Wiener Library:
It’s so vast, the whole thing is so unthinkable. I found myself saying that I lived on another planet. So it’s a different language… and yet you’ve only got language. You’ve got to be careful not to over-sentimentalize. By that I mean that maybe the biggest drama is the lack of drama. Look at a book like the chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto and you’ve got entries that were done at the time for the future; day to day entries, as things were happening. In a way it becomes normal to say how many people have committed suicide, threw themselves from the bridge; or that there has been a deportation. Only by recording it like that, by showing that this was the norm of existence – you realise that the lack of drama is the whole drama. Make a list!67
The scenes of moving along the shelves in Housed Memory repeatedly fade in and out at either the end or the start of each shelf. The tracking shot creates a series of discontinuous scenes,
64 Uriel Orlow, ‘Latent Archives, Roving Lens’, in Jane Connarty and Josephine Lanyon (eds.), Ghosting: The Role
of the Archive within Contemporary Artists’ Film and Video, exhibition catalogue, Bristol: Picture This Moving
Image, 2006a, p. 38.
65 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, New York: Zone Books, 1999, p. 12.
66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., p. 41.
although using a linear line of camera movements.68 The artist himself points out that this endless procession “produces a sense of the unknowable in the face of a totality which cannot be accessed”.69 With regard to this, Michael Newman explains that Orlow’s filming strategy reveals this inaccessibility. The camera’s gaze moves along an infinite line of being
concurrently continuous and discontinuous, while producing ruptures again and again and going nowhere.70 Explicitly showing the physical continuum of the accumulative records in the archive ironically demonstrates the failure of its system per se, that is the necessary crisis of what it is supposed to represent: conveying the historical event from the past as it is at the present time.
Both Kawara and Orlow’s works portray the archive’s incapability to document
immeasurable time and memory as a complete unity in a present moment. In Kawara’s case, his listing of past and future time imitates a typical bureaucratic procedure of archivisation:
recording linear times in a chronological order (or otherwise, the sheer number of chronology itself), using general office supplies of toner and print and binding books and presenting them as a series volume. Meanwhile, Orlow’s video recording documents an endless sense of archival physicality as it is, through which the enormity and severity of a historical event like the Holocaust is reduced to the mere monotonous procession of books, files, and boxes. Both works share a common interest in the repetitive performance of seriality, accumulation, and enumeration either in the numerical order of listing or in the use of visual images as listing. According to Ernst van Alphen, making a list is based on “the principle of etcetera” and “the principle of expandability”.71 It means that repetitive listing is always done in a temporary state that can be expanded continuously by additional etcetera and etcetera. Listing does not just function to create a complete order in a practical way but evokes the infinite, heading towards ungraspable expansion and openness.72 Therefore, the repetitive listing of printing numbers in
68 Ibid., p. 40. 69 Ibid.
70 Michael Newman, ‘Archive, Testimony, and Trace: Uriel Orlow’s Hosed Memory’, in Uriel Orlow et.al., Uriel
Orlow: Deposits, Berlin & Sussex: Green Box, 2006b, p. 81.
71 Alphen, op. cit., 2014, pp. 97-98. To explain the nature of listing, Alphen cites Umberto Eco’s book, The Infinite
of Lists, translated by Alastair McEwen, London: MacLehose Press, 2009.
Kawara’s work and the repetition of filming successive images as listing in Orlow’s film successfully perform the failure of historical and mnemonic representation in achieving totality, perfection, and closure. When material substitutes of times and memories are accumulated in the form of archives, a comprehensive listing is supposed to be made in order to maximise its administrative efficiency. However, Kawara and Orlow only mark this typical system and procedure of the archival act as bureaucratic aesthetics and meticulously repeat the tasks set out for them. While a certain bureaucratic procedure is repeated to produce a dominating system and official narratives, both artists playing the roles of archivists do not intend to propose commemorative, describable, and productive meanings from what they are doing. Instead, they dramatise a sense of infinite listing and its temporary and expandable quality. In short, their failing journeys administered by the archival/anarchival performance of the endlessly repetitive listing implies that the material condition of the archive is not everlasting or fixed to have a hegemony over a certain way of writing history and memory but on the move causing a continuous hiatus within systems.
Furthermore, visualising the archive’s torpor, these two works demonstrate the vastness of time’s passage and how traumatic events from the past “delimit us” in a Foucauldian sense. For Foucault, the archive means neither the sum of historical documentation nor the physical space where those texts are stored. It is a discursive formation of “the law of what can be said” so that it is impossible for us to describe our own archive at the present time.73 As time is outside our archival language and systems of archiving, it is necessary for us to be separated from the archive through chronological time and distance, in order for it to be analysed more sharply.74 Hence, for the analysis of the archive at a distance, variations of statements in the different categories of discourses should be sought in Foucault’s method. In doing so, totality and finitude in any social discourse should be undermined and the immanent power operating in any social system, like the archive, should be critically questioned. While the Wiener Library is a physical location containing documented memories of the Holocaust, Orlow’s video work
73 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, pp. 145-146.
is “an archive of the archive” like a meta-archive, embodying a growing memory in itself.75 His intention is to witness and record the site and the people who stop by there. Orlow’s archive unveils the naked scene and emphasises the exterior scaffolding of the archive, which
stimulates repetitive rhythms to produce the reverse effect of disturbing its physical condition and of eventually being anarchival with a feeling of burnout.
Both artists’ anarchival performativity of repetition demonstrates the failure of archives to capture the event, which is uncontainable and vaster than any individual or collective agency. Namely, their self-reflective attempts at showing failing moments of archives point out to the loophole of the institutionalised archival system. Nonetheless, their works also simultaneously reconfirm the archival performativity of bureaucratic repetition and enhance both the archival structure as exterior and the operational principle as interior, thus gaining a certain kind of ruling authority. The ways in which the archive is physically and routinely sorted out, managed, and licensed controls everyday life. Indeed, no power can be imagined without an underlay of files and documents in any social and cultural institution today. Whether it is failure or not, the archive is still the most widely used form of record-keeping as a governing framework in society. In a similar sense, Foucault argues that all social mechanisms in the modern era, including the archive, operate through power, and Derrida claims that the archive is a site of political power. The archive brings about the issue of authoritative hierarchy in which one manipulated vision can be officially manifested. There are artistic endeavours that amount to a shaking of such authoritative control and the bureaucratic rigidity inscribed in the archive. Voluntarily imitating (or relying on) exteriority and language of institutional and bureaucratic archives, the artists below intervene in the given context and authority and their individual and idiosyncratic archives represent a mode of resistance to such power operation in the
institutional territory.
Frederico Câmara (b.1971) created a photography project, Inside/Out (2006) (Fig. 2.1.8), which was a series of images set-up inside the archive during his fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. Câmara’s images show various types of strong rooms in archives and
museums as well as the sculpture stores and libraries to which limited access is allowed to authorised persons only. Those places are a type of “non-space, generally unseen, in which the locked-up items play a silent waiting game, sitting in readiness to be chosen”.76 Victoria Lane, archivist of the Henry Moore Institute, recalls that Câmara’s unusual visit (or intervention) evoked the typical role and function of the archive as an off-stage room. This is because what Câmara asked for was “a security risk” that could result in failure to protect sensitive materials or confidential files from exposure through a camera.77 One of his documentary photographs includes a scene of the abandoned library entitled Old Library (2006), which explicitly uncovers “the accident of a broken, disused store”.78 By exposing the hollow centre of disused archive rooms, the power that is commenced and commanded within those places is emptied. In addition, the enlarged picture, once installed outside the institute for the exhibition, creates a peculiar resonance by turning the secret space inside into a public spectacle. His intervention into those closed spaces and their subsequent photographic reproduction opens up a visual and conceptual way to access the unpermitted sites by subverting them into liminal spaces or